An actual laugh, not polite, not managed just the real thing. Sudden and genuine. "Did you keep the job? " he asked. For another 8 months, she said, until I got the Halverson offer. Then you ended up here.
Then I ended up here, she agreed. It was quiet for a moment. Is it what you expected? She thought about it honestly because he was asking honestly. No, she said it's harder than I expected and more interesting than I expected, which is usually how the things worth doing turn out.
He picked up the rope he'd been coiling and started the next loop. Calder's coming around, he said in a tone of complete casualness that was entirely deliberate. He doesn't say so. I know. She said he asked me last night what I thought of the auction plan.
She stopped what she was doing. What did you tell him? I told him it was risky, but the math made sense. He paused. He said he knew the math made sense.
He says that that wasn't the question. What was the question? Tobin set down the rope. He looked at her with the directness that was his most characteristic trait, the quality that made him seem older than 13 when he chose to use it. He said the question was whether we could trust the judgment behind the math.
Whether her instincts match her numbers. That's what he said. Her instincts. He looked at her steadily. I told him, "Yeah. " I thought, "Yeah. " She held his gaze for a moment.
"Thank you," she said. "Don't thank me," he said, picking up the rope again. "It's just what I think. " But he said to it with the faintest trace of something that was satisfaction, and she understood that for Tobin, stating what he thought plainly was a thing he valued, and a thing he didn't extend carelessly, and that telling her this had been a choice. With 8 days left before the auction, the weather turned. It came gradually, at first, a drop in temperature that the thermometer made plain each morning, a change in the quality of light that flattened everything and made the mountains look closer and more serious.
The creek along the east boundary developed a thin skim of ice in the mornings that melted by noon, but returned by the following dawn. Warren watched the sky. So did Calder. So did the old gray dog that lived at the edge of the yard and had apparently predicted every significant storm of the past several years by the simple method of not going past the porch when one was coming. The dog hadn't left the porch in 2 days.